Nixie Plasma ball

This one came out over a year ago and we missed it. [Daqq] has made a plasma ball out of a nixie tube. All that was required was the transformer from a cold cathode meant for computers and a nixie tube. He did have to do a tiny bit of modification to the power supply, which you can see on the project page. This isn’t the most useful project, since you can’t really see much of the plasma, but it is really cool nonetheless. We think this would make a really neat button. You can see a video of it in action after the break.

Talk about risky, that ‘useless’ capacitor on the inverter’s HV output is for current limiting.
Without it the inverter can deliver over 50mA at a few 100V RMS for a short time, have fun touching that.

Maybe I’m missing the joke, but you don’t seem to be aware that Nixie tubes are *neon* filled devices, not hard vacuume, and that they are already “gassy”.

In service, neon devices such as Nixies and Decatrons have two main failure modes, the glass goes dark near the emitting cathode, and sometimes the cathodes can go spotty (reputedly due to contamination during manufacture, particularly in flat 7-seg displays) but they have a very long service life. In storage they seem to have almost infinite life with tubes manufactured several decades ago still working perfectly when applied.

Since standard light globes are filled with low pressure argon these might also be worth giving a go if you want a more bluish discharge.